Native American Performance and Representation

13. Performance and “Trickster Aesthetics” in the Work of Mohawk Filmmaker Shelley Niro

Native American1 media experienced an impressive growth over the last thirty years as Native American filmmakers took up the camera to reclaim the screen. Native filmmakers use media to articulate the complexities of contemporary Native life and to counteract the absence of Native perspectives in the mainstream mediascape.2 Native filmmakers document cultural practices, recuperate community narratives, and sustain cultural memory through their media. Film and video have become salient forms of expression through which Native people negotiate cultural traditions and identities. Film and video have also been employed to challenge and respond to dominant representations of Native Americans. This chapter analyzes Native media as a medium through which Native filmmakers resignify cultural traditions and practices of representation in the borderlands between dominant and Indigenous forms of film/video practice. I draw upon the metaphor of “borderlands” and border theory as a framework for analyzing the improvisations, cultural play, and border crossing that are characteristic of Native life as well as Native cinema. The space of “borderlands” has been theorized as a site of the negotiation of identity and community where multiple voices and experiences are expressed in complex and often contradictory ways. Artist, scholar, and curator Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree) articulates the concept of borderlands to include the numerous improvisations and innovations that occur within the cultural space between multiple social worlds. He argues, “The border zone is a place for new cultural practices that involve improvisation and the recombination of disparate cultural elements, creating a diverse cultural repertoire. Identity becomes ever stronger, not diffused.”3 I use this borderlands framework to examine the cinematic space of Native media as a venue through which multiple Native voices and chapter 13 Performance and “Trickster Aesthetics” in the Work of Mohawk Filmmaker Shelley Niro Kristin L. Dowell 208 Kristin L. Dowell experiences can be presented, contested, and negotiated. Borderlands theory can be useful as a way to account for the improvisation, complexity, polyvalency, and contradiction that Native media offer to contest dominant Hollywood representations that cast Native people as one-dimensional, “vanishing,” “barbaric,” or “noble savages.” Indigenous aesthetics within Native media illustrate the performative strategies that Native filmmakers use to counter dominant stereotypes of Native people with alternative representations of their communities. After first providing a brief historical sketch of the development of Native media and the institutional structures under which this work is produced and circulated, this chapter explores “trickster aesthetics” and humor as a strategy of resistance and cultural survival in the work of Mohawk filmmaker Shelley Niro. I analyze her films Honey Moccasin (1998) and It Starts with a Whisper (1993) to connect her use of parody and humor with larger Native discourses and theories of a Native “trickster” aesthetic within Native art and literature. Development of Native American Film and Video The legacy of dominant forms of visual representation of Native peoples has left a profound absence of positive portrayals of Native life from Native perspectives. Film scholar Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish) discusses the impact of the development of the “Hollywood Indian” on popular representations and conceptions of Indians. She contends, “The history and cultures of Native Americans have been miscommunicated in films, and the distortions have been accepted as truth, with sometimes disastrous results.”4 She argues that stereotypes of Indians historically developed in cultural forms such as the dimestore novel, captivity narratives, and Wild West Shows, and solidified in celluloid through Hollywood’s distortions and misrepresentations of Native Americans, consequently impacting public perceptions of Native Americans. Native American projects of self-representation in film, video, and photography critique dominant (mis) representations by creating works that reflect more accurately the complexity and diversity of Native voices, experiences, and histories. The steady growth of Native American film and video over the last thirty years has coincided with several important technological, historical, and political moments. Advances in technology have made video equipment much more portable and less costly. Moreover, the political activism “trickster aesthetics” in the work of shelley niro 209 during the 1960s and 1970s and the impact of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and Red Power movement challenged the social and political inequalities facing Native communities. Political activists in these movements recognized the importance of the media to raise awareness of their activism and stressed the necessity of Native people creating media to tell their own stories. During this period institutional organizations such as the Museum of the American Indian (renamed the National...